China builds a road to the future but will Britain join the journey?

The PM is seeing first hand in Beijing how her hosts invest in skills and expertise to provide a platform for the next generation 
Peter Frankopan1 February 2018
WEST END FINAL

Get our award-winning daily news email featuring exclusive stories, opinion and expert analysis

I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice.

It must be a relief for Theresa May to be on the other side of the world, far from the scheming within her party and gloomy briefing papers being leaked that forecast the effects of Brexit on the economy as ranging from bad to disastrous.

It’s all good news in Wuhan and Beijing, though, where the Prime Minister is due to meet President Xi Jinping today. The result of the UK leaving the EU, wrote Theresa May earlier this week, is that the country will become “ever more outward-looking”. That is good news for China, she went on, where the time has come to “intensify the golden era of UK-China relations”.

Things have gone well so far during her visit, with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang stressing that “our relationship will not change with the changes of EU-UK relations”. That commitment to stability is a welcome relief after months of turbulence at home.

The Prime Minister was able to announce initiatives such as an extension of an exchange programme for maths teachers, a training scheme for primary school teachers in both countries and a campaign called “English is GREAT” (those capital letters presumably mean the slogan needs to be shouted; but maybe that’s the point). All lovely enough; but they are hardly signs of a golden era.

Still, it could have been worse. In 1793, the first British mission to China was told point blank that it had nothing of any interest to offer and that a trade deal was out of the question. China’s connections penetrated deep into “every country under heaven”, wrote the Qianlong Emperor to King George III. “We possess all things,” he went on, “I have no use for your country’s manufactures.”

That turned out to be bluster — and also wrong. In fact, it was Britain that had built connections to many countries “under the heaven”, if not quite all of them. It was Britain that had a strategic plan and wanted access to the best markets on the best terms. And despite the initial rebuttal, it did so in China too — so effectively, in fact, that a century later more than 80 per cent of Chinese exports were carried on British ships.

Now, 200 years on, the tables have turned. It is China that is establishing links all around the world. Much of this is being done as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s signature foreign and economic policy that has so far committed nearly $1 trillion to infrastructure projects in Asia, Europe and Africa. The Belt and Road Initiative is inspired by the silk roads of the past which allowed trade to flow between continents and between peoples despite “differences in race, belief and cultural background”, as President Xi put it when he announced the policy in Astana, Kazakhstan, in 2013.

The Belt and Road is a complex animal, with multiple aims and objectives. Understanding it requires careful analysis not only of its conception and execution but also its development and its consequences. Some commentators believe the investments in infrastructure are not financially viable and both obscure a host of issues, problems and challenges but also potentially put a series of time-bombs in place that will tick into the future; others take a more rosy view, and point to the massive scale of investment (almost exclusively in the form of loans), Chinese building expertise and the fact that there clearly can be mutual benefits to upgrading infrastructure that serves some 60 per cent of the world’s population.

The problem, of course, is that Britain’s prospects of making sense of what is going on, let alone influencing it, are as gloomy as those leaked Brexit papers. We are singularly ill-prepared to understand or play a role across the part of the world that stretches from Eastern Europe to the Pacific. The number of students studying modern languages at A-level has plummeted in the past decade, while those studying Chinese, Arabic or other “oriental languages” at university are laughably low — measured in hundreds, not thousands.

There should, of course, be a minister for the silk roads to help the UK both follow and engage with connected parts of the world at a time of profound change, and to understand the big picture of reconfiguration, not of China on its own but of Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan, the Central Asian republics and beyond. The scale of the Belt and Road Initiative and parallel plans put forward by India, Russia and others demand systematic attention. Ironically, Britain could and should be using its strengths in financial services, law, education, international development and the charitable sector, and also its own historical experiences, to teach lessons others can learn from.

There are successes in this regard, such as UK aid clean water projects in Kyrgyzstan, British Council sports projects in Pakistan, British schools opening in the Gulf, Thailand, Vietnam and China, and even the establishment of courts presided over by British judges in Kazakhstan. But pressure on the Foreign Office budget, as well as that of the British Council and the BBC World Service mean the UK’s global footprint is getting smaller, not bigger.

So perhaps the best news this week comes from the sale of the British Embassy in Bangkok for £420 million. This money should be ring-fenced for Britain abroad and ploughed into ensuring that the UK does not just respond to events but plans for the future.

Engaging with China, like Russia, or Iran, Saudi Arabia, India or indeed any other country, is not easy. There are not only differences of opinion but issues such as human rights, press freedom, religious tolerance and free speech that need to be handled diplomatically.

But you can’t have your cake and eat it: if the UK is to be more outward-looking and succeed in the post-Brexit era, it needs to invest now in the skills, knowledge and expertise needed to ensure future generations in this country are able to play a part in a highly globalised world. That is what China is doing. We should be doing the same.

Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World is published by Bloomsbury

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in